Indonesian Muslim Intelligentsia and Power

Yudi Latif

Publication Year: 2008

This book presents a genealogy of the social networks and power struggles of the major influential group of Indonesian-educated Muslims called "intelligentsia". In this effort, the longue durée approach is combined with an interactive, inter-disciplinary and inter-textual method to better understand the various underlying impulses and interactions contributing to continuity and change in the long-term development of the Muslim intelligentsia and its relation to power. In doing so, this book provides a major and important contribution to the study of the social history of contemporary Indonesia a plausible claim to being the first of its kind.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF FIGURES

LIST OF TABLES

GLOSSARY AND ABBREVIATIONS

FOREWORD

Yudi Latif’s Indonesian Muslim Intelligentsia and Power is a study of great scope and importance. There is no comparable study of its kind in the extensive literature on Indonesia. Given its considerable scope and its critical historical argument, it is a book that should be essential reading for an understanding ...

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The history of this book is the history of human compassion and mutual
understanding. That the book originated from my Ph.D. thesis at the
Australian National University, its presence in the “republic of letters”
(respublica litteraria) would have been impossible without the support and ...

1. INTRODUCTION

Out of the galactic crisis of the Indonesian polity at the twilight of the
previous century, a new crescent began shining in the sky of Jakarta:
the emergence of the Muslim intelligentsia as the rising political and
bureaucratic elite.
In the late Suharto era, following ...

2. THE FORMATION OF THE INTELLIGENTSIA

As they entered the nineteenth century, the “clerisy”4 of the “land below the
winds” stood at a crossroads. The knowledge road to Mecca inherited from
previous centuries through the international networks of ulama remained.5
At the same time, the deepening penetration of Dutch colonialism and ...

3. MAKING INDONESIA, MAKING INTELLECTUAL POLITICAL TRADITIONS

From the second decade of the twentieth century, the intelligentsia had found the means to communicate with the masses. Recognizing the misery of the masses, the high-sounding ideas of kemadjoean inherited from previous decades lost their magnetism. In the face of increasing social dislocation, it ...

4. INTELLIGENTSIA AS THE POLITICAL ELITE OF THE NEW NATION

For more than four years after the proclamation of Independence, Indonesians
had to defend their self-proclaimed freedom through revolutionary struggle
as the Dutch attempted to reassume the control over the territory. In this
critical historical phase, the national euphoria of independence provided ...

5. THE NEW ORDER’S REPRESSIVE-DEVELOPMENTALISM AND THE ISLAMIC INTELLECTUAL RESPONSE

When the Sukarno regime crumbled in 1966, the rising new power began
to designate the period of Guided Democracy as the Old Order [orde lama] and celebrate the new era as the New Order [orde baru]. Although Sukarno was still granted official status as the President of Indonesia until 17 October ...

6. THE RISE AND DECLINE OF THE ASSOCIATION OF INDONESIAN MUSLIM INTELLIGENTSIA (ICMI)

Suharto’s increasing satisfaction through the 1980s with his ideological and
economic handiwork coincided with the waning influence of the old political
brokers within the New Order polity. As Elson observed (2001, p. 244): “Ali
Murtopo’s star, for so long in the ascendant, had begun to wane following ...

7. CONCLUSION

The end of a century and of a study is a moment for retrospection and
reflection. The turn of the twenty-first century is just a numerical event, which does not necessarily contain historical significance. In the Indonesian context, however, historical events at the dawn of the new century invoked a ...

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